ESSEX, Andrew

PERSONAL: Married; children: one son. Education: New York University, B.A., M.A.

ADDRESSES: Home—Brooklyn Heights, NY. Agent— c/o Author Mail, City & Co./Rizzoli Publications, 300 Park Avenue South, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10010.

CAREER: Journalist. Details magazine, music editor, then executive editor, 2000-04; Absolute(TM) magazine, editor-in-chief, 2005—. Also held editorial posts at Entertainment Weekly, Salon, Us Weekly, and New Yorker.

WRITINGS:

New York's Fifty Best Night Spots, City & Co. (New York, NY), 1995, revised edition, 1997.

(With Stephan Paternot) A Very Public Offering: ARebel's Story of Business Excess, Success, and Reckoning, J. Wiley (New York, NY), 2001.

Contributor of articles to magazines and newspapers, including New Yorker, New York Times, Rolling Stone, Outside, Entertainment Weekly, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Food & Wine, Interview, and Details.

SIDELIGHTS: Editor and writer Andrew Essex's first book is a guide to nighttime New York—New York's Fifty Hottest Night Spots. His second book, A Very Public Offering: A Rebel's Story of Business Excess, Success, and Reckoning, is a cautionary tale of the boom and bust era of dot-coms in the 1990s, as filtered through the story of one such business, theglobe.com. Published in 1997 A Very Public Offering follows the fate of the book's coauthor, Stephan Paternot, who is the brainchild of theglobe.com. Working with his Cornell classmate Todd Kizelman, Paternot developed theglobe.com as a chat and community site which morphed throughout its seven-year existence into an e-commerce site. On the day of the firm's initial public offering (IPO), Paternot was, for one brief instant, worth ninety-seven million dollars as his dot com soared in value 606 percent. Paternot was only in his mid-twenties, like so many other entrepreneurs of the dot-com bubble. Ultimately, however, theglobe.com lost all its value and ceased to be listed on the stock exchange.

Partly a memoir and partly a story of a business snafu, A Very Public Offering details the high life Paternot led, flying in his private jet and enjoying Manhattan night clubs. For New York Times Book Review contributor Rob Walker, these personal memories loom too large in the book. Walker wrote that A Very Public Offering "is less like a business book than a pop star's self-serving reminiscences of a fleeting moment at the top," and added that "Paternot still seems confused about the relationship between a business and its share price."

Similar criticism came from Heather Green, who reviewed A Very Public Offering in Business Week Online. Green stated that the book "supports the notion that too many people were creating companies, raising money, and going public without much thought at the beginning, middle or end of their Internet rides." Green further noted, "Paternot blames investors, bankers, and the press for the vortex that eventually sucked the life out of his company." However, Green contends that Paternot's and other dot-coms failed because of internal reasons. New Statesman reviewer Adam Wishart described A Very Public Offering as "not so much a business book . . . as a coming-of-age tale; if nothing else, [Paternot] . . . was in precisely the right place to be a genuine witness of the age."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

New Statesman, December 10, 2001, Adam Wishart, review of A Very Public Offering: A Rebel's Story of Business Excess, Success, and Reckoning, p. 55.

New York Times Book Review, November 4, 2001, Rob Walker, review of A Very Public Offering, p. 13.

San Francisco Business Times, May 19, 2000, "Rude Words in Salon," p. 4.

ONLINE

Business Week Online.http://www.businessweek.com/ (September 10, 2001), Heather Green, review of A Very Public Offering.

ForRelease.com,http://www.forrelease.com/ (October 7, 2004), "Andrew Essex Named Editor-in-Chief of Absolute(TM), the New Luxury Lifestyle Magazine for New York."*